Lottery addicts go to extremes

(Ecns.cn) -- Among the seven million Chinese who have lottery fever, the majority are low-income earners who risk losing it all at any moment, says the Xinmin Weekly.

Core players are low in social and economic position and see the lottery as a chance to change their fortunes, even as further gambling gets them deeper into trouble.

Meanwhile, lottery ticket issuers and sellers mislead buyers with improper advertising. Some even try to encourage customers to take higher risks.

Addictive industry

China's lottery sales will top 280 billion yuan (US$44 billion) in 2012, an increase of at least 27 percent from last year, according to an industry expert.

Feng Baiming, director of the Lottery Research Institute at the Henan University of Finance and Economics, says China's lottery industry has developed very rapidly: sales almost doubled between 2009 and 2011, an uptrend that will continue this year.

The expansion of the market has much to do with an increasing number of players who spend money compulsively to fuel their addictions.

According to a recent survey by the Lottery Investigation Center of China, 430,000 of the country's 200 million lottery players suffer from extreme addiction.

Most extreme addicts are between 18 and 45 years old, relatively uneducated and earn about 2,000 yuan (US$314) a month, says the Xinmin Weekly.

Easily stimulated

On June 27, a young man in Nanjing won a 256-million-yuan (US$40 million) sports lottery jackpot, the largest ever in China. A week later he and his wife took home nearly 206 million yuan after taxes and donated 5 million yuan to Project Hope.

The news was a shot in the arm for lottery addicts and the number of ticket buyers suddenly spiked.

Mr. Hu, a 40-year-old Shanghai resident, was one of those buyers. On July 5, he went to a lottery ticket store to check whether he had won a prize (he had bought lottery tickets worth over 100 yuan the day before).

Hu, previously the owner of a printing shop, owed a gambling debt of 200,000 yuan (US$31,380). Faced with increased pressure to pay, he put his faith in the lottery.

In the past year, Hu says he spent about 1,000 yuan a month on lottery tickets, but the money he won back was negligible.

Yet every time news broke of someone winning a big prize, Hu's hopes would be raised again and he could not restrain his impulse to buy more tickets.

Many lottery addicts share the same psychology.

Mr. Yu is a vegetable vendor from Anhui province. Two years ago he became addicted to the lottery and has been unable to control himself ever since. From two yuan to several hundred yuan at a time, Yu now spends almost everything he earns – and gets nothing in return.

False advertising

According to the Lottery Ticket Management Regulation, all lottery ticket stores should use the same posters and advertising slogans. Many ignore those rules.

Instead, banners saying "buy a lottery ticket and win five million yuan" are frequently seen, which are believed to influence buyers to throw more money away on high-risk investments.

Some shop owners even use probability theory to offer customers "insight" into how to buy tickets.

The establishment of a welfare lottery is intended to help people, not to trap them, said a lottery ticket buyer in Shanghai.

The legislative office should urge the government and lottery agencies to strengthen the implementation of regulations and set up rescue funds to help addicts, otherwise such addictions can result in serious problems, he added.